Things I read in November.
The Scientist Who Saved the World
Profile of Dr. Katalin Karikó in Glamour who awarded her Woman of the Year for her work on mRNA which led to the vaccine against Covid-19.
Are you better off today?
Article from the Resoultion Foundation on real income growth under different UK governments since 1955.
You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation
Shoshana Zuboff in the New York Times, comparing suriviellance to excraction and regulating financial incetvices for surveillance.
The Metaverse Is Already Here — It’s Minecraft
Although there have been a lot of arguments for different applications that are already the Metaverse (Fortnite, Discord etc) I think Minecraft really has turned out to be the best contender for what we thought Second Life would be like.
David Graeber’s Possible Worlds
Nice to see so much being written about Graeber.
The Tinkerbell Griftopia
Digital technologies were meant to act like replicators in Star Trek, but scarcity has come back. Also see: The NFT Bay.
many of the old ideas have largely been displaced by the rising generation of software developers, and instead we now see an ascendant soft-neoliberal philosophy of software that believes in the infallibility of markets, deregulation and almost deifies the notion of scarcity. Information doesn’t want to be free anymore. And then came NFTs which are almost the purest embodiment of this conflict of ideas one could possibly imagine: a purely speculative asset built on the supposed notion of artificial information scarcity and whose entire existence depends on a collective shared faith in this notion. A belief that artificial information scarcity is not only inevitable but desirable, and that the act of buying the “vanity of buying” is just the latest fashion in conspicuous consumption because All is Vanity.
MS Teams Productivity Score
This was from Wolfie Christl’s thread on Twitter about the use of metrics inside MS Teams from last year, but a recent conversation reminded me of this.
0b3f88b (Published November reading log)